Tag Archives: backlog

Injustice, Tomb Raider and Organ Trail

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It’s been tough getting game time in these last two weeks. I must have underestimated how busy I would be during the summer. Most of my time has been sucked up playing Animal Crossing: New Leaf, which as most know is basically unbeatable. But I did finish a game this week at least and made some progress.

Injustice: Gods Among Us

Cost: $39.99

Status: Completed

Time to beat: 5 hours and 25 minutes

Shame how Deathstroke just turned into the character for noobs.

Shame how Deathstroke just turned into the character for noobs.

Ricardo already posted a review on the site about Injustice, but I had a chance to play through it on my own. What a dumb, but fun, game. Besides the ho-hum character design, this is exactly what I wanted out of a superhero fighting game. Created by NetherRealm studios, the game is similar to the studio’s previous fighting game, Mortal Kombat, but differentiates itself enough to make the fighting mechanics interesting. What am I talking about? I never really play fighting games, but the DC Comics hook and a little peer pressure got me into playing this game.

One of the best parts of the game are the transitional stages. When a player throws a fighter against a wall, they sometimes will break through into another part of the stage in an absolutely ridiculous animation. It’s a joy to watch as much as finding out each character’s special attack, which are arguably crazier than the screen transitions. Actually, pretty much all of the game is off the wall, when considering that the main story arc is about two different dimensions and DC favorites jumping back and forth between them. It’s silly, but completely entertain and a blast to play.

I turned out to be partial to fast characters, like Flash and Nightwing, while still enjoying a few others such as Ares. Unfortunately, I could never win an online game, because people are just too good at fighting games. There is a lot of theory that I simply don’t know and my twitch reaction time isn’t always the best. Still I had fun with the single player and I could stomp down a few friends with a bit of effort. Well worth the price I paid for the game and for anyone who is either a fighting game or DC Comics fan.

Tomb Raider

Cost: $39.99

Status: Incomplete

Time played: 8 hours and 25 minutes

Lara reacts with grief after killing a man, but 15 minutes later, she kills a dozen more.

Lara reacts with grief after killing a man, but 15 minutes later, she kills a dozen more.

One of the biggest games to be released this year was Lara Croft’s return adventure. It’s a gritty reboot, of course. I forgot that it was rated M until the first time Lara was violently impaled by a innocent branch. This game holds no punches and could almost be considered a bit torturous to the heroine. She gets her payback though, with out-of-place execution moves that would be nearly impossible to learn within eight hours of being on an island. At least they look cool!

The game is basically Batman: Arkham City mixed with Uncharted, which is not a knock to the game at all. It plays to the idea that every new item or weapon you get will  unlock a previous area that was formerly inaccessible. It’s fun, and the game plays best when there is no combat involved. It’s not that combat is bad, it’s just dry when compared to how much fun exploring and collecting is. Maybe I want a game that plays like a modern Donkey Kong 64.

Going to continue plowing through it. My goal is to get this game done this week.

Organ Trail

Cost: ~$5 Android Humble Bundle 6

Status: Incomplete

Time played: 1 hours and 10 minutes

Name them after your friends for twice the fun!

Name them after your friends for twice the fun!

Organ Trail is simply Oregon Trail with zombies. You make a team of four ragtag survivors and attempt to travel to the other side of the country. Along the way, your station wagon gets attacked by zombies and some of your survivors can be bit. At some of the stops there is an option to kill an infected survivor in hopes of protecting the rest of the team. It really isn’t that much different from, but that’s not a bad thing. It’s still fun to play and I hope to get into it more. It also just dawned on me that this is kind of a rogue-like, which is a genre I have been missing on my phone for a while. Hope to put much more time into this in the coming weeks. If you’re interested, it might still be on sale on humblebundle.com and is playable on PC and Mac as well as Android.

 

Added to backlog:

Android Humble Bundle 6

 The Witcher 2

Theme Hospital

 

Prologue

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I have a problem.

I can’t pass up a good deal. Even if I don’t need something, finding a great deal on a piece of technology or even food gives me a little rush at the checkout. Sure, saving money is great, but there is one major drawback. Lack of use. I hate wasting anything. When I hate wasting anything, buyers remorse happens a lot when I buy something I don’t need and end up not using it. It’s a vicious cycle.

The biggest culprit of my downfall is video games. I have tons of them. Sure it might be good that someone who wants to write about video games professionally has a large collection of them, but a lot of the time they would be purchased to simply gather dust, physically or virtually. Thanks to Amazon, Steam and Green Man Gaming I can find a deal on nearly every game, old and new. Just today I grabbed a two for ten deal off a site I had never heard of before thanks to SlickDeals. Hooray! Now I own DarkSiders II and Deus Ex: Human Revolution! Then a thought came to me: I needed to see if I actually owned these games before I bought them.

I fired up Steam and breathed a sigh of relief when I found that I owned neither of them. But, the fact that I have to check without actually knowing what games I own told me that I had to do something. Rather than swear off buying games entirely (that will never happen and would probably be bad from a career standpoint) I will take time to beat the games I buy and jot them down in this column, along with thoughts about the game and purchases the previous week.  Although I am no doctor, this seems like the healthiest way to curb my addiction, since I will be gaining valuable knowledge about games and will be able to brush up on my writing at the same time, but I care about my health a lot that’s why I go to the best health centers, and have a Spokane medical malpractice lawyer in case something goes wrong during my health checkups or treatments.

For a look into how many games I have failed to beat, or even touch, I imported my Steam account into Backloggery.com. I went down the list and checked off every game I had beaten. After much scrolling and clicking, it turned out the results were mostly unsurprising. Out of the 170 games I own on Steam I had only beaten 41 of them. This needs to be put to an end. The quest to complete my backlog needs to start now when I have the time. But first, I need a few ground rules to keep me sane and accountable.

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1. Attempt to beat every game I can

The keyword here is attempt. Every game will be started with the intention to beat. But to be realistic, there are some games that are just too hard for me to complete or can’t be finished. For example, I have sunk countless hours into the latest SimCity, but there isn’t a foreseeable end to the game. At no point are the credits going to roll. But there is a feeling I get when I am nearing the limit of what a game has to offer me. An example of a game that is too hard is Osmos. That game gets to the point of restarting over and over hoping to get a better position and becomes completely frustrating and hopeless experience. Those games I will just count as beat, since I got all I wanted (or could handle) from that experience.

2. Mark down every game I buy between posts

I want to keep myself accountable if I buy any games while trying to beat my backlog. This includes even the Humble Bundles I pick up. Backsliding into a higher game count isn’t the worst thing that could happen, because at least I will be logging and keeping track of it, but I want to at least discourage myself from spending money and increasing my backlog.

3. Don’t feel ashamed to use FAQs, if needed

Alright, most games should be attempted to be beaten solely on my own, but as a human I have the tendency to get stuck in places. Normally I just give up when I hit a seemingly impossible section because looking up how to beat a level or puzzle of a game irks the insides of me and makes me feel like I didn’t actually beat the game. But here is where that mentality stops. I am here for the experience the developers have created, not to get frustrated with my own stupidity. Besides, there are many other parts in my life for me to get frustrated at. Shoelaces, am I right guys?

4. Beat, not complete

While there is a spot to mark off a game as completed as opposed to beaten, I want to set realistic goals. Trying to finish over a hundred full length games with the added pressure of having to search every little nook and cranny, sounds like something that would drive me to the edge of sanity. Seeing the end credits would be enough to make me feel like my purchase was worth it. Although, if the game was compelling enough I am not going to hold back an urge to collect everything, but I will just not make it a priority.

 —

So here goes nothing. This is an experiment that will hopefully help me finish the games I spent money on and as a bonus, provide content to the site. The first game I will attempt to finish will be the Guacamelee! I have almost neared completion of that game and will eventually be able to beat it.  Hope everyone enjoys reading this. See you next week!